WHEREAS, parent engagement is essential to ensuring children thrive in the classroom;

WHEREAS, the power of partnerships between parents, teachers and the community is at the heart of school change by establishing meaningful ways for parents to collaborate in their children’s public education from the beginning—before a school is failing;

WHEREAS, parents are actually calling for real investments in their neighborhood public schools that should be the collective focus of unions, parents , students and community;

WHEREAS, teacher unions are democratic organizations that empower educators to win the tools and voice they need to help children and collective bargaining is the process by which individuals come together to make things better;

WHEREAS, a recent Education Sector survey of teachers made clear that America’s teachers—both union and nonunion—recognize the importance of unions in strengthening the teaching profession and our public schools;

WHEREAS, the movie “Won’t Back Down” (WBD) portrays teacher unions as the culprit for all of the problems facing our schools, instead of recognizing problem of declining resources, crumbling infrastructure, over- structured teaching curricula focused around testing rather than learning and lack of dialogue between parents and school systems;

WHEREAS, WBD poses a false choice between either the students or the teachers rather than collaborative work between parents, community and school to make low performing public schools into schools where every parent would want to send his or her child and every teacher would want to teach;

WHEREAS, WBD portrays “parent trigger laws” as parent engagement tools instead of the reality that these laws use parents to give control of our schools over to for-profit corporations; and,

WHEREAS, Pride At Work (P@W) supports the rights of workers to organize, collectively bargain and preserve union work from privatization.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that P@W inform its member about the false premises and attacks on unions portrayed in Won’t Back Down, and

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that P@W and its chapters unite with teacher union affiliates, parents and community groups to educate, inform and demonstrate to community members how school reform can work through collaboration and engagement rather than division and,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that P@W encourage its members and their families to work with their public schools to improve infrastructure, increase communications about school programs and generate partnerships to improve the quality of public education.